If Mathematicians Had Nicknames

Her name is Tara, but she should expect her friends to call her by a different name from now on.

Not knowing all seven dwarfs is forgivable. Not knowing that sneaky isn’t spelled with two e‘s is less excusable. That she committed both errors simultaneously all but guarantees that her friends will call her Sneaky for the rest of her life.

Or maybe it’s only a guy thing to give nicknames to their friends for colossal fails?

If a guy had made this mistake, his best friend would have texted him before the show was over:

Nice guess, Sneaky.

I got a nickname in a most inglorious fashion. After an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Fort Devens, MA, we headed to the local bar and ordered a round of Irish car bombs.

The problem was, the Guinness arrived in a 16-ounce plastic cup, and the shot of Bailey’s and Jameson’s arrived in a 10-ounce plastic cup. When we tried to drop the smaller cup into the larger cup, it floated. We spent a good half-hour debating how we’d get the shot to the bottom of the larger cup, and I seemed to offer more ideas than most. The bartendress, finally tired of my yammering, looked at me and said, “Okay, cupcake, you gonna talk about it all night, or you gonna drink it?”

All I could think was, “Dear Lord, I pray that my friends didn’t hear that.”

When I turned around, they sang in unison, “Cuuuup-caaaaaake.”

It stuck. That was 15 years ago, but there are those who still call me Cupcake on the Ultimate field. And sadly, there are those who still call me Cupcake when they run into me at the grocery store. Nothing like your seven-year-old, father-worshiping son asking, “Daddy, why did that man call you ‘Cupcake’?”

Sadly, famous mathematicians don’t have nicknames. At least not cool ones, not generally. Sure, Euclid may be the “Father of Geometry,” but his friends didn’t call him that when they were drinking mead around a campfire. And while textbooks may refer to Leibnitz as the “Aristotle of the 17th Century,” none of his peeps did.

The only two cool mathematician nicknames I could find — and by “cool,” I mean that they didn’t start with “Father of” — were “The Passionate Skeptic” for Bertrand Russell and “The Samian Sage” for Pythagoras. Granted, it’s not like “The Italian Stallion” for Rocky or “The Master of Disaster” for Apollo Creed, but mathematicians aren’t generally nickname-acquiring types.

But I think mathematicians deserve nicknames, so here are some suggestions for your consideration.

About MJ4MF

The Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks blog is an online extension to the book Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks. The blog contains jokes submitted by readers, new jokes discovered by the author, details about speaking appearances and workshops, and other random bits of information that might be interesting to the strange folks who like math jokes.